New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday that his administration will release more than 170,000 pages of documents shedding new light on the air quality around Ground Zero in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In a press conference at the City Hall Rotunda, Mamdani said these documents would only be the first release of information that will reveal new details about “what the city knew about the toxic air around Ground Zero, when they knew it and how they acted to limit liability.”
Over the next year, hundreds of thousands of more documents will be released onto a public portal that will be freely accessible to every New Yorker, Mamdani said.
The creation of the portal came about after the city settled a lawsuit from 9/11 Health Watch, an advocacy organization that sued to obtain the documents now being released.
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The first tranche of documents being released Tuesday on the portal will involve the 68 boxes of Department of Environmental Protection files that were found “a few years ago,” Mamdani said.
Also included in the release will be the Harding memo, a letter that was sent to Bob Harding, a deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani. It was sent to him after the attacks on the World Trade Center, and it outlined that there could be tens of thousands of legal claims filed against the city.
Jon Stewart, who has spent years advocating for 9/11 first responders, said at the press conference that the memo showed the city buried the truth about the toxic nature of the air for nearly 25 years.
“There was poison in the air and on the ground and in the window sills and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes. And it stayed there for months,” Stewart said.
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“Everyone knew. And now it’s very clear that the city knew as well. And rather than take the steps to ameliorate the damage that that would cause to its citizens and to the people that were down there, they instead covered it up to get back to business as usual,” Stewart added.
The document release comes days before the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. The majority of people died at the World Trade Center after two planes were flown into the Twin Towers by al-Qaeda terrorists.
In addition to the World Trade Center, hijackers struck the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to retake control of the aircraft.
Officials repeatedly noted that 25 years later, more people have died from illnesses linked to the attacks than were killed on Sept. 11 itself.
The documents, officials said, show that asbestos remained present in parts of Lower Manhattan for months after the attacks and that benzene levels continued to spike near Ground Zero.
“Now, we in the public know that City Hall, led by former Mayor Giuliani, predicted that thousands of responders and community members would face devastating long-term health consequences from these toxins,” U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y. said at the Tuesday press conference.
The next release of documents that will be released to the portal will concern correspondence in Mayor Rudy Giulani’s office, who was leading the city at the time of the attacks, according to Steven Banks, the city’s top lawyer.
Banks said a third tranche will involve documents related to 7 World Trade Center, a skyscraper that was destroyed along with the Twin Towers and was subsequently rebuilt.
